Daily US Times: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan pledges to investigate Pakistani citizens linked to a massive leak on hidden global wealth, dubbed as Pandora Papers.
The leak link hundreds of Pakistanis, including Mr Khan’s cabinet members, to wealth secretly moved through offshore companies.
The Pandora Papers is history’s biggest financial leaks, exposing dealings of global business and political figures.
Imran Khan said he would take action if any wrongdoing was established.
The secret assets were uncovered by a global investigation based on leaked financial documents of offshore companies to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has been working with more than 140 media organisations around the globe.
More than 700 people in Pakistan were named in the papers, among them two members of the cabinet, according to the country’s media reports,
The leaked documents say, Shaukat Tarin, finance minister of Pakistans, and members of his family owned four offshore firms.
A financial adviser named Tariq Fawad Malik, who handled the paperwork for the companies, told the ICIJ that the companies were set up by the Tarin family with the intention of investing in a bank with Saudi business connections. But Mr Malik said that the deal did not proceed.
The leaked documents, which contain 12 million files, also suggest that Chaudhry Moonis Elahi, Pakistan’s water resources minister, pulled out of making planned investments through offshore tax havens after he was warned the investment would be reported to the country’s tax authorities.
Elahi family’s spokesperson rejected the allegations and said their assets have been declared in accordance with the law.
The spokesperson said: “Political revenge and misinterpretation of the data have been spread in the documents in bad faith.”
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